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Washington diary

By Andreas Frew

IT CAN happen to anyone. You go into a store, see an item you like the look
of, find that you have just enough money to pay for it and, when the clerk rings
it up, you realise you forgot to add on sales tax and can’t afford it.

That’s how Representative James Sensenbrenner felt when he saw the cost of
the Spallation Neutron Source, a &dollar;1.3 billion toy for materials
physicists being built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It
seems any construction in Tennessee comes with a sales and usage tax, and the …